Society of Fellows scholar Anastasia Kostina has two recently published works. The first is a peer-reviewed article, "I Want to Make a Film About Women": The Story of Esfir Shub's Unrealized Feminist Manifesto" in Slavic and East European Journal, vol. 69, no. 3 (Fall 2025), pp. 378–396 (abstract below). The second is a Chinese translation of her work on Esfir Shub's writings, accompanied by an extensive introduction, with Shibo Yang and Chaoqun Zhang. "Forgotten Early Women Filmmakers: Selected Writings of Esfir Shub." Film Criticism (China), No. 6, pp. 93–102. (2005).

Abstract

Slavic and East European Journal, vol. 69, no. 3 (Fall 2025), pp. 378–396

“I Want to Make a Film About Women”: The Story of Esfir Shub's Unrealized Feminist Manifesto

Anastasia Kostina, Columbia University

In 1932, acclaimed Soviet documentarian and pioneer of the found footage compilation film, Esfir Shub, announced her intention to make a film about women. Described by her as “a cinematic document about Soviet women,” the project aimed to combine an observational approach with an intense dramatic structure. By the end of 1933, Shub and her co-author, Soviet writer Boris Lapin, had completed a seven-chapter script titled Women, which focused on four individual heroines. Alas, Shub’s cinematic document about women never came to fruition and survives only as a collection of documents—including the script, some notes, and a handful of photographs selected by the director for the film. This article reclaims the story of Shub’s unrealized feminist manifesto, Women. Drawing on extensive archival evidence, it reconstructs a continuous history of the project and uses this historical context to analyze the script, shedding light on what is arguably the most obscure—and most important—period of Shub’s filmmaking career. The article demonstrates how Shub’s inventive documentary vision came into conflict with the ideological constraints of the state. Finally, it argues that while Shub’s innovations never reached the screen, they remain significant for offering an alternative developmental path for documentary film and for reshaping our understanding of feminist film history.